Monday, April 14, 2008

Google App Engine - First impressions

* It is free, but with quotas. The business model is probably to get others to build apps so that Google can get users, searchable data & then eventually offer a business edition.* You don't have to worry about hosting, load balancing & scaling which is indeed huge since writing the web application is the easiest among all of the above.* The initial release is not ready for business apps, it doesn't have an SLA nor does it have a good support for authentication & authorization.* You need to learn Python if you haven't already, but future support for ruby or php could be expected soon.* There are no issues in hosting flash or flex application except for the login to google account issue.* Python frameworks like Django are natively supported, but you can use your own framework as well.* It is possible to do GQL queries and Google full text search support.* And there is the full offline sdk for those who can't get an account yet.* Just use your own user model instead of Google's to avoid lockin.* Some have even gone ahead and ported AppEngine to Amazon EC2 even though without the BigTable support.* I wonder how Amazon EC2 & other $5.99 webservice providers are going to react?